Page 402 - The Social Animal

384 The Social Animal

the difficulties and excitements involved in conducting experiments in
social psychology.

When the subject (a female college student) arrived, the exper-
imenter greeted her and led her to an observation room con-
nected to the main experimental room by a one-way window
and an audio-amplification system. The experimenter told the
subject that two women were scheduled for that hour: One
would be the subject and the other would help perform the ex-
periment—and because she had arrived first, she would be the
helper. The experimenter asked her to wait while he left the
room to see if the other woman had arrived. A few minutes
later, through the one-way window, the subject was able to see
the experimenter enter the experimental room with another fe-
male student (a paid confederate). The experimenter told the
confederate to be seated for a moment and said that he would
return shortly to explain the experiment to her. He then reen-
tered the observation room and began the instructions to the
real subject (who believed herself to be the confederate). The
experimenter told her she was going to assist him in perform-
ing a verbal conditioning experiment on the other student; that
is, he was going to reward the other student for certain words
she used in conversation. He told the subject these rewards
would increase the frequency with which the other woman
would use these words. He went on to say that his particular in-
terest was “not simply in increasing the output of those words
that I reward; that’s already been done. In this experiment, we
want to see if the use of rewarded words generalizes to a new
situation from the person giving the reward when the person is
talking to a different person who does not reward those specific
words.” Specifically, the experimenter explained that he would
try to condition the other woman to increase her output of plu-
ral nouns by subtly rewarding her with an “mmmm hmmm”
every time she said a plural noun. “The important question is:
Will she continue to use an abundance of plural nouns when
she talks to you, even though you will not be rewarding her?”
The real subject was then told that her tasks were (1) to listen
in and record the number of plural nouns used by the woman
while the latter was talking to the experimenter, and (2) to en-
gage her in a series of conversations (in which the use of plural